Cryptocurrency: Now in Crimea – Eastern Daily News

While some countries are busy trying to come up with laws to regulate the use of cryptocurrencies, others are busy coming up with laws to legalize digital currencies. In light of the events by the European Commission, member countries of the European Union are coming up with laws to regulate Bitcoin. Russia has however not made such steps, instead its doing the opposite. Last year Russia announced that it considers Bitcoin transactions and exchanges as legitimate in the eyes of the law. This was good news to the Cryptocurrency world considering that Russia is a country where laws relating to capital control are more strict than in most countries.

Dmitry Marinichev, Russias internet ombudsman, has made suggestions to bringthe use of cryptocurrencies to residents of Crimea. With Crimea in need of investors, Mr. Marinichev believes that opening of Cryptocurrency exchanges will help to attract new investors to this region. For this to be successful, a free economic zone will have to be created within the peninsula. Mr. Marinichev also had this to say on regulation of Cryptocurrencies in Russia: Today Crimea is an exclusive economic zone, which makes it possible to start with the opening of Cryptocurrency exchanges operating there absolutely legally. As a result we will see the actual legalization of Cryptocurrencies.

The head of the Working Group For the Assessment of Risks of Cryptocurrencies in the state of Duma of the Russian Federation, Elina Sidorenko highlighted that using Cryptocurrency instruments for international transactions would improve the banking climate on the peninsula. There is truth to that sentiment because major players in the banking industry do believe that the blockchain technology, which is the technology behind cryptocurrency, is the future of global financial system.

There is a significant number of regions in Crimea, which are unbanked. Residents of these unbanked regions of Crimea now have good news because transactions involving digital currencies do not need banks to be validated. Cryptocurrencies are completely decentralized and the blockchain technology ensures that transactions are validated, hence detecting any fraudulent or unauthorized transactions. Alex Fork, CEO of Humaniq had this opinion on the unbanked regions: Unbanked regions usually consist of a financially poor population. the most important thing is to provide them with a new technology available absolutely free of charge.

There have been countries, mostly in the European union, that in recent times are trying to regulate digital currencies because of criminals using them to commitillegal operations. These unbanked regions provide a chance to experiment and finally make a sound decision regarding digital currencies. The residents of these unbanked regions also get a chance to enjoy the exciting advantages of cryptocurrencies. This move by Russia provides a win-win situation for both the regulator and the residents. Its always good news in the cryptocurrency world when a new country joins.

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Cryptocurrency: Now in Crimea - Eastern Daily News

The FBI is Worried Criminals Might Use the Private Cryptocurrency Monero – CoinDesk

The privacy-focused digital currency monero has captured the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has expressed concerns overits use among criminals.

Joseph Battaglia,a special agent working at the FBIs Cyber Division in New York City, said during an event last week that widespread use of the increasingly popular cryptocurrency might impact the way the agency conducts investigations.

Addressing a group of about 150 law students at New York's Fordham University, hesaid:

"There are obviously going to be issues if some of the more difficult to work with cryptocurrencies become popular. Monero is one that comes to mind, where its not very obvious what the transaction path is or what the actual value of the transaction is except to the end users."

Launched in April 2014, monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency with enhancedprivacy features. A fork of the Bytecoin codebase, monero leverages identity-obscuring ring signatures to make it unclear which funds have been sent by whom and to whom.

The cryptocurrency saw its price soar in 2016, climbing from about $0.50at the beginning of the year to about $12, a 2,760%increase.

Since 2013, the agency has seen "enormous growth" in the number of cases involving digital currencypayments, according to Battaglia. Of those, 75% involved bitcoin, he said, though he mentioned litecoin and monero as other cryptocurrencies the agency has encounteredthus far.

TheFBI Cyber Division looks into a diverse range of online criminal activity.

In 2015, the agency reportedransomware losses of$18mfroma single type of software. Since at least last October, the agency has been investigating a $1.3m bitcoin theft tied to the hacking of theBitfinex exchange.

Battaglias statements came afterhis "high-level" account of a typicalcryptocurrency investigation given at theevent, which oneof a series of blockchain workshops co-hosted withIBM.

Other panelists included Brigid McDermott, vice president of blockchain business development at IBM; Dan Ramsden, a Fordham Business School adjunct professor; and Gregory Xethalis, a partner at law firmKaye Scholer.

Following the event, the special agent said he couldn't provide additional details specifically pertaining to the FBIs investigative techniques surrounding monero when asked by CoinDesk.

Duringthe panel, however, Battaglia described the FBI as "a reactionary organization", addingthat, instead of trying to predict the direction that cryptocurrency use might go, the agency has adopted await-and-see approach.

Battaglia concluded:

"Were going to look at what catches on, and what becomes mainstream, and then were going to keep an eye on that, because usually not long after that is when you start to see some of the fraud and some of the more nefarious uses of that technology."

Photo credit: Bruce Gilbert / Fordham University

CrimeFBIMonero

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The FBI is Worried Criminals Might Use the Private Cryptocurrency Monero - CoinDesk

BCC Cryptocurrency Exchange Launches in Record Time Following Successful Completion of BitConnect Coin ICO – newsBTC

January 30, 2017 BitConnect.co, the team behind BitConnect Coin (BCC) takes pleasure in announcing the completion of its successful ICO. The ICO saw community members buying over 1 million BCCs, paving the way for the next phase of development which included the launch of its proprietary BCC exchange.

During the ICO, the new cryptocurrency was sold at the rate of 1000 BCCs per BTC, and the early adopters received up to 40% bonus on their investment. With enough backers, the platform finished the exchange development in just ten days. The BCC exchange will see a lot of new features in the coming days, including the addition of support for multiple cryptocurrencies alongside BCC.

BitConnect Coins full-node software is openly distributed with a new desktop client for mining and staking the cryptocurrency under proper guidance. BCC holders can now use the existing web wallet to conveniently send the cryptocurrency to BitConnect desktop client and other desired trading platforms. The BitConnect Coin is based on a special POW/POS algorithm for added network security. The algorithm also turns BCC into an interest-bearing asset with a 120% return per year. To gain profits through POS minting, users will have to hold their coins in aBitConnect-QT wallet.

BCC community members can experience a new level of empowerment through the open source platform that connects them socially and financially to a secure, protected community of investors and lenders. With the communitys help, BCC owners can also benefit from the cryptocurrencys exponential price rise by increasing their deposits in the wallet. The interest gained during the period translates to a hefty profit.

Few new features in store for 2017 include the launch of BCC Mining and Staking Pool and its own Smart Card. These features will not only allow community members to earn, but also spend the cryptocurrency for their everyday expenses. The whole BitConnect platform, which started as a concept in Q1, 2016 has scaled to become the worlds fastest growing online Bitcoin community. The website, BitConnect.co features among the top 80k sites on Alexa. More information on BitConnect Exchange is availablehere.

About BitConnect

BitConnect is an open source platform for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency users to earn, learn, but and sell bitcoins to other trusted community members directly.

Learn more about BitConnect at https://bitconnect.co/ Register on BitConnect Exchange at https://bitconnect.co/register Access BitConnect-QT wallet at https://bitconnectcoin.co/guide/10/How-To-Set-Up-BitConnect-Coin-Wallet-on-Windows-Operating-System#Download

Media Contact

Contact Name:Vindee, Marketing Manager Contact Email:bitconnect@tutanota.com Phone:+16415696739 Company Name:BitConnect Ltd Contact Location:Ashford, England

BitConnect.co is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer protections. This press release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest.

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BCC Cryptocurrency Exchange Launches in Record Time Following Successful Completion of BitConnect Coin ICO - newsBTC

EverGreenCoin – Environmental Green Causes, nurtured by …

What is EverGreenCoin?

EverGreenCoin is much more than a new currency, a new 'cryptocurrency' as it's called. Cryptocurrency is a sort of digital money that can be used as a store of value or in exchange for goods and services. The EverGreenCoin currency itself is only the mechanism leveraged to nourish our more important focus, taking responsible care of our environment and the world we live in.

EverGreenCoin is a decedent of Bitcoin and EverGreenCoin inherited some great traits from its ancestors. Traits like being able to transfer anywhere in the world with near zero fees, regardless of borders. Zero risk to personal information loss or theft because personal information is never required. Zero manipulation by governments and banks because EverGreenCoin is not printed, or 'mined' as the case may be, out of thin air. Rather the supply is finite, predetermined, rates never change, and only the free market dictates its price. But we, the environmentally awake, will determine its true value.

EverGreenCoin has taken its ancestral traits and built upon them, and in ways more friendly for both our planet and the people storing, spending, and receiving value with EverGreenCoin. In large part, this comes from Proof of Stake mining. Proof of Stake replaces the Proof of Work methodology for making transactions happen and securing the record of transactions that have happened in the past. This record is called a blockchain. For maintaining the blockchain through mining, you are rewarded and this is true for both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake.

The difference is that with Proof of Stake, you are not wasting electricity and taking a gamble on what your reward amount might be. With EverGreenCoin your reward is always 7% annual and the energy consumed is no greater than running a word processor on your computer and can be done in the background during times you already have your computer on.

EverGreenCoin is also much faster than Bitcoin. Transaction on the EverGreenCoin network are fully confirmed, which means fully received and spendable, faster than a Bitcoin transaction would get its first confirmation. In what Bitcoin could transfer in an hour, EverGreenCoin could do 10 times over again. Actually 100 time, because of EverGreenCoin's larger blocks also.

Neither traditional banking system nor Bitcoin can give you what EverGreenCoin gives you. In addition, you are helping yourself and all living things by increasing asset potential for EverGreenCoin's environmental aspirations.

It is free to make an EverGreenCoin account. You do not need to surrender any personal information. You do not need a credit check. There are no age or border restrictions. You do not need to make an account on this website, but it is encouraged as it will allow you to communicate with like-minded people. Click here for help deciding which solution is best for your needs.

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EverGreenCoin - Environmental Green Causes, nurtured by ...

Ebitz cryptocurrency

Zerocash transactions

Zerocashs functionality is realized using just two new types of transactions: mint transactions and pour transactions. Like Bitcoin transactions, Zerocash transactions are broadcast and appended to a decentralized ledger.

Mint transactions. A mint transaction allows a user to convert a specified number of non-anonymous bitcoins (from some Bitcoin address) into the same number of zerocoins belonging to a specified Zerocash address. The mint transaction itself consists of a cryptographic commitment to a new coin, which specifies the coins value, owner address, and (unique) serial number. The commitment is based on the SHA-256 hash function, and hides both the coins value and owner address.

Individual Zerocash nodes maintain a Merkle tree over all of the coin commitments seen thus far. Any user can then demonstrate ownership of a coin commitment, via its decommitted values as well as a short witness of membership in the tree. Unfortunately, merely publishing this information as an ownership proof is not private; instead, to achieve privacy, we rely on a second type of transaction, which allows a user to prove, in zero knowledge, that he knows such information.

Pour transactions. A pour transaction allows a user to make a private payment, by consuming some number of coins (owned by this user) in order to produce new coins. Roughly, a pour transaction, for (up to) two input coins and (up to) two output coins, involves proving, in zero knowledge, that:

The pour transaction consumes the input coins by revealing their serial numbers, but does not reveal any other information such as the values of the input or output coins, or the addresses of their owners. Optionally, the pour transaction can also output some (non-anoymous) bitcoins. This last feature can be used to transfer zerocoins back into (non-anonymous) bitcoins or to pay transaction fees.

For a mint transaction, the commitment contained therein is constructed so that that anyone can verify that the committed coin has the claimed value.

For a pour transaction, anyone can verify that the zero-knowledge proof contained therein is valid (and that a few other simple invariants hold). For efficiency, however, Zerocash does not use any zero-knowledge proof, but leverages zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) systems, which are zero-knowledge proofs that are particularly short and easy to verify.

Ebitz is a clone of Zcash without founder rewards and changing his algo. We are going to collect funds in another way, giving an opportunity to all investors in an open pre-sale, not in shady close doors ICO. And we are going to change the algo to PoS to prevent the control by a few centralized GPU farms. Its a Zerocash implementation with more fair use and organization for the crypto community. We are going to port all the updates from Zcash to Ebitz. With the funds collected we expect to add some new features to Ebitz, that they are not included in Zcash right now. We dont want to collect a big amount of money with Ebitz (we dont need it), so we are thinking to put a limit to the open pre-sale.

Whitepaper 1

Whitepaper 2

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Ebitz cryptocurrency

Dash (cryptocurrency) – Wikipedia

Dash

Official Dash logo

Dash (formerly known as Darkcoin and XCoin) is an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that offers instant transactions (InstantSend),[1] private transactions (PrivateSend)[2] and token fungibility. It was rebranded from "Darkcoin" to "Dash" on March 25, 2015, a portmanteau of "Digital Cash".[3]

Dash operates a decentralized governance and budgeting system, making it the first decentralized autonomous organization.[4]

Dash uses a chained hashing algorithm called X11 for the proof-of-work. Instead of using the SHA-256 (from well-known Secure Hash Algorithm family) or scrypt it uses 11 rounds of different hashing functions.[5]

As of 2016, Dash is among the top-7 most popular cryptocurrencies.[6]

Main website is http://www.dash.org

PrivateSend is a coin-mixing service originally based on CoinJoin. Later iterations used a more advanced method of pre-mixing denominations built into the user's wallet. The implementation of PrivateSend also allows masternodes to submit the transactions using special network code called DSTX,[7] this provides additional privacy to users due to the deadchange issue present in other CoinJoin based implementations such as DarkWallet and CoinShuffle.[8]

DarkSend rebranded to PrivateSend June 2016.

In its current implementation it adds privacy to transactions by combining identical inputs from multiple users into a single transaction with several outputs. Due to the identical inputs, transactions usually cannot be directly traced, obfuscating the flow of funds. PrivateSend makes Dash "Fungible"[9] by mixing the coins in the same denomination with other wallets, ensuring that all coins are of the same value.

PrivateSend's mixing is performed by Masternodes, servers operating on a decentralized network which have the responsibility of signing the transactions. For each round of PrivateSend, the user selects two to eight (or even more) rounds of mixing which vary the degree of anonymity achieved. Random Masternodes are then elected to perform the coin mixing. Masternodes are trust-less cryptographic technology, in the sense that they cannot steal user coins, and the combination of multiple Masternodes ensures that no single node has full knowledge of both inputs and outputs in the transaction process.

To avoid the possibility of sybil attack, a process where a peer-to-peer network is overtaken by "bad actors", collateral requirements have been added to the process of joining the Masternode network second tier. These are presently 1000 DASH [10] and allow secure network communication in via signed messages. As an incentive for operating a Masternode, chosen nodes currently earn 45% of the mining rewards.[11]

InstantSend is a service that allows for near-instant transactions. Through this system, inputs can be locked to only specific transactions and verified by consensus of the Masternode network. Conflicting transactions and blocks are rejected. If a consensus cannot be reached, validation of the transaction occurs through standard block confirmation. InstantSend purportedly solves the double-spending problem without the longer confirmation times of other cryptocurriencies such as Bitcoin.[12]

InstantX rebranded to InstantSend June 2016.

X11 is a hashing algorithm created by Dash core developer Evan Duffield. X11's chained hashing algorithm approach utilizes a sequence of eleven cryptographic hashing algorithms for the proof-of-work. This is so that the processing distribution is fair and coins will be distributed in much the same way Bitcoin's were originally.[citation needed]

With chained hashing, high end CPUs give an average return similar to that of GPUs. Another side effect of the algorithm is that GPUs run at about 30% less electrical power than scrypt and 30% to 50% cooler, putting less stress on the computing setup and ensuring lower energy bills for miners.[13]

Dark Gravity Wave (DGW) is a mining difficulty adjustment algorithm created by Dash core developer Evan Duffield to address flaws in Kimoto's Gravity Well. It uses multiple exponential moving averages and a simple moving average to smoothly adjust the difficulty, which is re-targeted every block. The block reward is not adjusted strictly by block number, but instead uses a formula controlled by Moore's law: 2222222/((Difficulty+2600)/9)2.[14][15]

Dash is the first decentralized autonomous organization powered by a Sybil proof decentralized governance and funding system.[16] DGBB or Decentralized Governance By Blockchain as it's called is a decentralized process by which the network determines where money is spent. Each Masternode operator is given the ability to use 1 vote on each governance proposal, which is a completely open and decentralized process.[17] Community interaction with proposal submitters is done usually through community driven websites, like DashWhale.[18] These websites allow proposal submitters to provide multiple drafts, then lobby for community support before finally submitting their project to the network for a vote. After the submitter has enough support, the network will automatically pay out the required funds in the next super block, which happen monthly.

Although, only in use a few months, the funding system has seen growth of its month revenue, from originally ~$14 thousands in September 2015, to nearly $30 thousands in March 2016.[19] Eventually the budget system can theoretically scale to $9M per month at a market cap of $500M.[20]

Since its inception, the project has used the system for important assets like acquiring dash.org,[21] adoption into the Lamassu ATM[22][23] and the Dash N' Drink instant soda machine,[24] along with funding many public events.[25][26][27][28]

Masternodes utilize a cryptographic bond model, which results a supply and demand market between the interest rate Masternodes are paid and the risk of holding the underlying asset. Early on in the history of the asset, the high return caused a massive uptake of Masternodes, starting from about 500 in Oct 2014 and increasing to 3650 in March 2016.[29]

Dash was originally released as XCoin (XCO) on January 18, 2014. On February 28, the name was changed to "Darkcoin". On March 25, 2015, Darkcoin was rebranded as "Dash".[3]

I discovered Bitcoin in mid 2010 and was obsessed ever since. After a couple of years in 2012 I started really thinking about how to add anonymity to Bitcoin. I came up with maybe 10 ways of doing this, but I soon realized that Bitcoin would never add my code. The developers really want the core protocol to stay the same for the most part and everything else to be implemented on the top of it. This was the birth of the concept of Darkcoin. I implemented X11 in a weekend and found it worked pretty well and it would give a completely fair start to the currency. What I really was aiming for with X11 is a similar development curve where miners would fight to create small advantages much like the early start of Bitcoin. I think this a requirement to create a healthy ecosystem.

[30]

Within the first hour of launch, approximately 500,000 coins were mined, followed by another 1,000,000 coins in the next 7 hours and finally another 400,000 in 36 hours. All told 1.9 million coins were mined in 48 hours, or approximately 32% of the current supply (as of October 2015) of approximately 5.9 million,[31][32] generating controversy regarding the initial distribution of coins. According to Duffield, this was the result of an error in the code "which incorrectly converted the difficulty, then tried using a corrupt value to calculate the subsidy, causing the instamine".[33] At the time, Duffield was working a full-time job and coding for Dash on the side, so its not surprising that there were errors in the initial code.[33] Duffield claims in the official bitcointalk.org thread (mirrored) that "Dash has no premine and was fairly and transparently launched".[34]

At the time Dash (then called Xcoin) was launched, the cryptocurrency space was riddled with scams. People were creating new currencies, hyping their value, then dumping them and abandoning the project. Many likely feared the same for Dash. However, since Dash's launch, there has been over two years of development, leading to a cryptocurrency that has over 50 volunteers and has solved such vexing issues as slow confirmation times, block size increases, decentralized governance, and a self-funding development budget.

According to CoinMarketCap, in August 2016 the daily trade volume of Dash was ~1% of the total trade of all cryptocurrencies,[35] and the market capitalization of Dash was ~80 millions of US dollars.[36] Since then, Dash has become the most active community on BitcoinTalk reaching more than 6000 pages, 122k replies, 6.6M reads.

Zerocoin, Cloakcoin and DarkNet also have built in the mixing services as a part of their blockchain network.[37]

The Dark Wallet client software for bitcoin was built to natively mix transactions between users.[38]

Monero_(cryptocurrency) is a cryptocurrency based on the CryptoNote protocol. It has gained attention recently for being adopted by dark net market AlphaBay.[39]

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Dash (cryptocurrency) - Wikipedia

Monero (cryptocurrency) – Wikipedia

Monero

Monero Logo

Monero (XMR) is an open source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that focuses on privacy, decentralisation and scalability. Unlike many cryptocurrencies that are derivatives of Bitcoin, Monero is based on the CryptoNote protocol and possesses significant algorithmic differences relating to blockchain obfuscation.[1] Monero has ongoing support from the community,[2] and its modular code architecture has been praised by Wladimir J. van der Laan, a Bitcoin Core maintainer.[3] Monero's market capitalization followed an upward trend in the year 2016, going from $3.7 million (3 December 2015) to more than $170 million (3 September 2016), partly due to adoption by major darknet market AlphaBay, before correcting to around $60 million two months later (3 November 2016).[4]

Monero was launched on 18 April 2014 originally under the name BitMonero, which is a compound of Bit (as in Bitcoin) and Monero (literally meaning coin in Esperanto). Five days later the community opted for the name to be shortened just to Monero. It was launched as the first fork of CryptoNote-based currency Bytecoin, however was released with two major differences. Firstly, the target block time was decreased from 120 to 60 seconds, and secondly, the emission speed was decelerated by 50% (later Monero reverted to 120 seconds block time while keeping the emission schedule by doubling the block reward per new block). In addition, the Monero developers found numerous incidents of poor quality code that was subsequently cleaned and re-constituted.[citation needed]

A few weeks after launch, an optimized GPU miner for CryptoNight proof-of-work function was developed.[5]

On 4 September 2014, Monero recovered from an unusual and novel attack executed against the cryptocurrency network.[6]

Monero is an open-source pure proof-of-work cryptocurrency. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD.[7]

Its main emission curve will issue about 18.4 Million coins to be mined in approximately 8 years.[8][9] (more precisely 18.132 Million coins by ca. end of May 2022[10][11]) After that, a constant "tail emission" of 0.6 XMR per 2-minutes block (modified from initially equivalent 0.3 XMR per 1-minute block) will create a sub-1% perpetual inflation (more precisely [see ref. above] starting with 0.87% yearly inflation around May 2022) to prevent the lack of incentives for miners once a currency is not mineable anymore.[12] The emission uses a smoothly decreasing reward with no block halving (any block generates a bit less monero than the previous one, formula: Emission per 2-minutes block = max(0.6,floor((MA)219)1012) XMR, with M=2641 and A=1012 times the amount of XMR already emitted). The smallest resolvable currency unit is 1012 XMR. The proof-of-work algorithm, CryptoNight, is AES-intensive and "memory heavy", which significantly reduces the advantage of GPU over CPU.

Monero daemon uses the original CryptoNote protocol except for the initial changes (as the block time and emission speed). The protocol itself is based on "one-time ring signatures"[13] and stealth addresses. Underlying cryptography is essentially Daniel J. Bernstein's library for Ed25519, which is Schnorr signatures on the Twisted Edwards curve. The end result is passive, decentralised mixing based on heavily-tested algorithms.[14]

However, several improvements were suggested by Monero Research Labs (a group of people, including core developers team), which covered the proper use of ring signatures for better privacy.[15] Specifically, the proposals included "a protocol-level network-wide minimum mix-in policy of n = 2 foreign outputs per ring signature", "a nonuniform transaction output selection method for ring generation" and "a torrent-style method of sending Monero output".[16] These changes, which were implemented in version 0.9.0 "Hydrogen Helix",[17] can help protect user's privacy in a CryptoNote-based currency according to the authors.

As a consequence, Monero features an opaque blockchain (with an explicit allowance system called the viewkey), in sharp contrast with transparent blockchain used by any other cryptocurrency not based on CryptoNote. Thus, Monero is said to be "private, optionally transparent". On top of very strong privacy by default, such a system permits net neutrality on the blockchain (miners cannot become censors, since they do not know where the transaction goes or what it contains) while still permitting auditing when desired (for instance, tax audit or public display of the finances of an NGO).[18] Furthermore, Monero is considered by many to offer truly fungible coins.[19][20][21]

Monero developers are also working on implementing a C++ I2P router straight in the code. This would complete the privacy chain by also hiding the IP addresses.[22]

"Monero is powered strictly by Proof of Work, but specifically, it employs a mining algorithm that has the potential to be efficiently tasked to billions of existing devices (any modern x86 CPU)."[23] Monero uses the CryptoNight Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm, which is designed for use in ordinary CPUs.[24]

The smart mining forthcoming feature will allow transparent CPU mining on the user's computer, far from the de facto centralization of mining farms and pool mining, pursuing Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision of a true P2P currency.[25]

Monero has no hardcoded limit, which means it doesn't have a 1 MB block size limitation preventing scalability. However, a block reward penalty mechanism is built into the protocol to avoid a too excessive block size increase: The new block's size NBS is compared to the median size M100 of the last 100 blocks. If NBS>M100, the block reward gets reduced in quadratic dependency of how much NBS exceeds M100. E.g. if NBS is [10%, 50%, 80%, 100%] greater than M100, the nominal block reward gets reduced by [1%, 25%, 64%, 100%]. Generally, blocks greater than 2*M100 are not allowed, and blocks <= 60kB are always free of any block reward penalties.

The Monero Core Team also released a standard called OpenAlias,[26] which permits much more human-readable addresses and "squares" the Zooko's triangle. OpenAlias can be used for any cryptocurrency and is already implemented in Monero, Bitcoin (in latest Electrum versions) and HyperStake.

XMR.TO allows to make payments to any Bitcoin address with the strong privacy provided by Monero.[27]

Since it is not based on Bitcoin, Monero cannot take advantage of the Bitcoin technological ecosystem, like GUI wallet or payment processors. As a consequence, everything has to be written from scratch.[28] Presently (as of March 2015), Monero doesn't have feature parity with Bitcoin. Notably, there is no support to multisignature and no Monero payment processor (but in April 2015 it was announced on bitcointalk.org one is in the works by a member of The Monero Core Team).

Monero transactions take up more space on the blockchain than Bitcoin transactions, and transactions will be even larger with RingCT added.[29] This makes it more expensive to run a full node.

Without RingCT implemented, it is still possible to deanonymize Monero transactions in some situations by analyzing the transaction amounts.[30]

CryptoKingdom is a MMORPG that uses Monero for entry into its economy.[37]

MoneroDice is a dice gambling game that uses cryptography for provably fair randomness.[38]

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Monero (cryptocurrency) - Wikipedia

Exchange Rates | CoinWarz – Cryptocurrency Mining vs. Bitcoin …

Bitcoin

(365)

(42)

(ACOIN)

(ALF)

(ANC)

(ARI)

(ARK)

(ASC)

(AUR)

(BNCR)

(BTA)

(BCX)

(BQC)

(BVC)

(BEN)

(BET)

(BIG)

(BTB)

(BTC)

(BTG)

(BTM)

(BLC)

(CAP)

(BCN)

(CAI)

(CANN)

(CSC)

(CAT)

(CNC)

(CIN)

(CNOTE)

(CON)

(CYC)

(CTM)

(CMC)

(CRC)

(CRYPT)

(BUK)

(CBX)

(CGA)

(CURE)

(DASH)

(DVC)

(DMD)

(DGB)

(DGC)

(DGC)

(DGC)

(NOTE)

(DOGE)

(EAC)

(EMC2)

(DEM)

(EMD)

(ENC)

(ETH)

(ETC)

(EXE)

(EXC)

(FRQ)

(FST)

(FTC)

(FFC)

(FLAP)

(FLO)

(FLT)

(FRAC)

(FRK)

(FRC)

(FZ)

(GLX)

(GAME)

(GLC)

(GDN)

(GLD)

(GPUC)

(GDC)

(GRS)

(NLG)

(HAM)

(HIRO)

(HBN)

(ICN)

(IFC)

(IEC)

(IXC)

(JPC)

(XJO)

(KARM)

(MEOW)

(KDC)

(KGC)

(LEAF)

(LGD)

(LTC)

(LTCD)

(LGC)

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Exchange Rates | CoinWarz - Cryptocurrency Mining vs. Bitcoin ...

What Is Bitcoin Cryptocurrency? Webopedia Definition

Main TERM B

By Vangie Beal

Bitcoin is a digital payment currency that utilizes cryptocurrency (a digital medium of exchange) and peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to create and manage monetary transactions as opposed to a central authority. The open source Bitcoin P2P network creates the bitcoins and manages all the bitcoin transactions.

Often referred to as "cash for the Internet," Bitcoin is one of several popular digital payment currencies along with Litecoin, Peercoin and Namecoin. When the word Bitcoin is capitalized, it usually refers to the software and systems used for bitcoin (in lowercase it means the actual currency).

Bitcoin is considered the biggest cryptocurrency. It was first introduced in 2009 and is the most widely-traded cryptocurrency. Bitcoin as an implementation of the cryptocurrency concept was described by Wei Dai in 1998 on the cypherpunks mailing list. Dai suggested a new form of money that uses cryptography to control its creation and transactions, rather than a central authority. In 2009, the Bitcoin specification and proof of concept was published in a cryptography mailing list by Satoshi Nakamoto. As noted in the Official Bitcoin FAQ, Satoshi Nakamoto left the project in late 2010 without revealing much about himself.

Payments are made via a Bitcoin wallet application that resides on a user's computer or mobile device, and a person only needs to enter the recipient's Bitcoin address information and payment amount before pressing send to complete payment.

New bitcoins are created by a competitive and decentralized process called "mining". Bitcoin miners are processing transactions and securing the network using specialized hardware and are collecting new bitcoins in exchange. The Bitcoin protocol ensures new bitcoins are created at a fixed rate, making the process of bitcoin mining a very competitive business.

According to eWeek, efforts to improve Bitcoin mining are now under way, working under the basic assumption that the cheaper you can mine Bitcoins, the more money you can make.

While attackers are going after Bitcoin-related sites, there is an important distinction between the security of the Bitcoin network and the Bitcoin exchanges. According to InternetNews.com, no one has ever found a critical vulnerability within the Bitcoin protocol itself that would allow a user within the Bitcoin network to fraudulently create coins or forge transactions. That said, there have been compromises of various Bitcoin exchanges throughout the virtual currency's lifetime, and as the value of a Bitcoin increases, so does the risk in using exchanges.

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What Is Bitcoin Cryptocurrency? Webopedia Definition

Alleged cryptocurrency scam took in $21Mwith nominal …

Further Reading In a new report, the court-appointed receiver assigned to investigate an alleged cryptocurrency scam has found no evidence of "any legitimate Gemcoin or other viable business."

In October 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had sued a Southern California company over an alleged Ponzi scheme resulting in a loss to investors of at least $32 million. If the governments accusations are correct, that would make Gemcoin one of the largest digital-currency-based financial schemes ever.

Thelawsuit came days after the United States Marshals Service and the Arcadia Police Department froze assets and raided corporate officesin Arcadia, north of downtown Los Angeles. Alliance Finance Group and its assets were promptly put into the hands of a court-appointed receiver, whose job it remains to examine what went wrong.

Numerous online promotional videos in many languages claim that Gemcoins parent company Alliance Finance Group and subsidiary United States Fine Investment Arts (USFIA) controlled $50 billion in amber mine assets in Latin America. The companies touted the fact that because Gemcoin was "backed" by these amber mines, this cryptocurrency had inherent value.

According to the February 2016 report, the receiver, Thomas A. Seaman, located over $21 million in gross receipts through the end of 2015. He wrote:

At this point, due to the volume of electronic data and disorganized manner in which it was kept by the Receivership Entities, the Receiver has not yet been able to identify the entire scope of the USFIA enterprise, the number of investors, or specific amounts invested by investors and distributed to them. The Receiver's work to analyze and better understand the investor data, with the assistance of his forensic computer specialist, is ongoing.

Aside from some income generated by the hotel and rental properties, the Receivership Entities had no significant source of income other than money raised from investors. The Receiver has verified that virtually none of the assets described in online and written marketing materials actually exist. Instead of mines located around the world, millions of dollars in precious gems, and houses and cars available to be awarded to investors, the Receiver has found only costume jewelry, boxes of rocks, and bins filled with tens of thousands of little rings of nominal value.

Steve Chen and the companies associated with Gemcoin also face a proposed class-action lawsuit on behalf of alleged victims filed in state court in Los Angeles.

The lawyer who brought the state case, Long Liu, did not immediately respond to Ars request for comment.

"Before it was just speculation, but now we have concrete evidence to show where the money went and how it was transferred," Liu told the Pasadena Star-News this week. "All of these companies were set up to defraud investors and to hide the money."

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Alleged cryptocurrency scam took in $21Mwith nominal ...

What is CryptoCurrency? – Understand CryptoCurrency

Crypto currency is a modern payment method that has been adopted by an increasing number of companies. However, even if this number is increasing substantially, the truth is that it is rather small in comparison with the total amount of companies from the entire world. A lot of companies are still asking themselves if they should accept crypto currency and if you have a company and you are wondering whether to adopt crypto currency as a payment method, you should know that this is a complex decision that should be carefully analysed. Should my company accept cryptocurrency? Pros Since crypto currency has many benefits, it seems fair to begin with all the pros. In this way you will be able to learn more about this, and therefore you can take the best decision for your company. Here you have a list with the most important pros that should be taken into account, as follows: No Fraud Crypto currency is a safer method of payment, and therefore people wont have to worry about losing any money, or even worse, they wont have to fear about identity theft; as a company, any payment that is maid is irreversible, and therefore you do not have to worry about chargebacks that you can often see fromcompanies like PayPal, Visa or MasterCard. Early adopters approval It seems that crypto currency represents the future, and even if there is a long way until it will reach its true potential, it is on the right track; Being a early adopter as a companygives you access to customers who are also early adopters. Global reach You will be able to have clients from different countries, and therefore you will increase your profit. Additionally, it seems that people prefer this method because in this way they do not lose money while exchanging currencies. Low transaction fees The fee to transfer money both between business to business as well as to and from customers are substantially cheaper than all other online payment methods. Cons As you well know, in almost every situation there are always pros and cons, and therefore you should take a decision only after you...

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What is CryptoCurrency? - Understand CryptoCurrency

Cryptocurrency Cabal

16 Dec 2015

The final project reports and sites are now posted: Project Reports

7 Dec 2015

The Evolution of Bitcoin Script Interpreter (Acacia Dai) A Bandwidth Based Proof of Work (Alishan Hassan) Bitcoin at Point of Sale (Elizabeth Kukla) Vending on Dark Net Markets (Collin Berman) Donation Accountability (Kienan Adams) Understanding Mobile Bitcoin Wallet (Ziqi Liu) BitSniffer: a Tool for Linkability Analysis (Ryan Anderson, Sam Prestwood, Luke Gessler) Taking Down Silk Road (Gardner Fiveash) How Much is Bitcoin Worth: Pricing Differences Across Exchanges and Time (Quentin Moore) Analysis of the viability of Bitcoin replacing as a National Currency (Peter Leng) Evaluating BlockCyphers Confidence Level (Dean Makovsky and Joseph Tobin and Kevin Zhao and Vignesh Kuppusamy)

2 Dec 2015

Developing a Distributed Distributed Consensus Protocol Consensus Protocol (Alec Grieser) Blockchain Voting (Sugat Poudel, Austin J. Varshneya, Xhama Vyas) BitMingle (Carter Hall, Reid Bixler) Beyond the Lightning Network - Exploring How to Scale Bitcoin (Muthu Chidambaram) Mixing with Miners (Morgan Locks) Pruning Nodes (Cyrus Malekpour) Bitcoin Block-size Options (Michael Parisi Presicce) Bitcoin Controversy and Conflicts of Interest (Jacob Freck) Detecting Selfish Mining in Bitcoin and Litecoin (Fangyang Cui) Geopolitical Strategy and Bitcoin (Eashan Kaw)

30 Nov 2015

Wednesday, 2 Dec and Monday 7 Dec: Final Project Presentations. See Class 25 for schedule.

These people are scheduled to present Wednesday: Alec Grieser, (Sugat Poudel, Austin J. Varshneya, Xhama Vyas), (Carter Hall, Reid Bixler), Muthu Chidambaram, Morgan Locks, Cyrus Malekpour, Michael Parisi Presicce, Jacob Freck, Fangyang Cui, Eashan Kaw, Cody Robertson.

Dont forget to send the link to your presentation before 11:59am on the day you are presenting!

Office hours: normal office hours will continue until December 11: Mondays 5-6:30pm (Ori in Rice 442), Wednesdays after class (Samee in Rice 442), Thursdays 2:30-3:30 (Dave in Rice 507).

Friday, 4 December, 3:30pm in Rice 130: Department of Computer Science, Distinguished Alumni Seminar Series

MAKING SECURITY USABLE (FOR A BILLION USERS)

How do you know if a website is safe? The security community puts enormous effort into detecting malware, stopping the next Heartbleed, and sandboxing bad content. Google Chromes usable security team sits at the front end of this work: we build the UI that tells end users whats going on with their privacy and security. What you see as a single icon might be the end product of months of work by engineers, designers, security experts, and user researchers. Ill explain some of the engineering and design challenges that we face, and give insight into the day-by-day work done by a security team that serves more than a billion browser users.

Bio: Adrienne Porter Felt leads Google Chromes usable security team, whose goal is to help people make safe decisions while using Chrome. Along with her team, Dr. Felt is responsible for building and improving the security warnings, indicators, and settings that you see in Chrome today. Previously, Dr. Felt was a research scientist on Googles security research team, where she examined how browser users react to security warnings. She received a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, and a BS from the University of Virginia in 2008.

Monday, 7 December (11:59pm): Project Final Reports. See Class 25 for details.

The slides below include all the Jeopardy questions, even ones we didnt get to in class. You shouldnt expect to get asked trivia questions in the oral final exam (and will not be asked to phrase your answers in the form of a question!), but some of the substantive questions here would make good questions to ask during the exam (in particular, Id recommend looking at the unused questions in Unlocking Script and Crypto Curves as good potential exam questions).

23 Nov 2015

Wednesday, 2 Dec and Monday 7 Dec: Final Project Presentations (see below).

Monday, 7 December (11:59pm): Project Final Reports (see below)

Understanding Mobile Bitcoin Wallet Ziqi Liu

Visual Explorer for Addresses and their Relations Ryan Anderson, Sam Prestwood, Luke Gessler

How Much is Bitcoin Worth: Pricing Differences Across Exchanges and Time Quentin Moore

Analysis of the viability of Bitcoin replacing as a National Currency Peter Leng

Beyond the Lightning Network - Exploring How to Scale Bitcoin Muthu Chidambaram

Mixing with Miners Morgan Locks

Bitcoin Block-size Options Michael Parisi Presicce

Bitcoin Controversy and Conflicts of Interest Jacob Freck

Understanding Takedowns Gardner Fiveash

Detecting Selfish Mining in Bitcoin and Litecoin Fangyang Cui

Geopolitical Strategy and Bitcoin Eashan Kaw

Evaluating BlockCyphers Confidence Level Dean Makovsky and Joseph Tobin and Kevin Zhao and Vignesh Kuppusamy

Pruning Nodes Cyrus Malekpour

Divergence of Alt Coins and their Concurrent Developments Cody Robertson

A Bandwidth Based Proof of Work Alishan Hassan

Developing a Distributed Distributed Consensus Protocol Consensus Protocol Alec Grieser

The Evolution of Bitcoin Script Interpreter Acacia Dai

The final project presentations will be in class on Wednesday, 2 December and Monday, 7 December. The presentation will count for approximately 50% of the grade for your final project.

The schedule of the presentations is below. Each team will have 5 + (N - 1) minutes to present your project (where N is the number of team members; so a 4-person team will have 8 minutes). Your presentation should be well prepared and enthusiastically delivered!

You should send a link to your presentation (PDF, PowerPoint, or anything that works in Firefox browser) to ccc-staff before 11:59am on the day you are scheduled to present. If your presentation includes a demo thats great, but it needs to be designed in a way that can be set up quickly and used effectively.

Wednesday, 2 December: Developing a Distributed Distributed Consensus Protocol Consensus Protocol (Alec Grieser) Blockchain Voting (Sugat Poudel, Austin J. Varshneya, Xhama Vyas) Distributed Bitcoin Mixing with Interest (Carter Hall, Reid Bixler) Beyond the Lightning Network - Exploring How to Scale Bitcoin (Muthu Chidambaram) Mixing with Miners (Morgan Locks) Pruning Nodes (Cyrus Malekpour) Bitcoin Block-size Options (Michael Parisi Presicce) Bitcoin Controversy and Conflicts of Interest (Jacob Freck) Detecting Selfish Mining in Bitcoin and Litecoin (Fangyang Cui) Geopolitical Strategy and Bitcoin (Eashan Kaw) Divergence of Alt Coins and their Concurrent Developments (Cody Robertson)

Monday, 7 December: The Evolution of Bitcoin Script Interpreter (Acacia Dai) A Bandwidth Based Proof of Work (Alishan Hassan) Bitcoin at Point of Sale (Elizabeth Kukla) Vending on Dark Net Markets (Collin Berman) Analyzing the Feasibility of a Donation Accountability System in Bitcoin (Kienan Adams) Understanding Mobile Bitcoin Wallet (Ziqi Liu) Visual Explorer for Addresses and their Relations (Ryan Anderson, Sam Prestwood, Luke Gessler) Understanding Takedowns (Gardner Fiveash) How Much is Bitcoin Worth: Pricing Differences Across Exchanges and Time (Quentin Moore) Analysis of the viability of Bitcoin replacing as a National Currency (Peter Leng) Evaluating BlockCyphers Confidence Level (Dean Makovsky and Joseph Tobin and Kevin Zhao and Vignesh Kuppusamy)

To submit your final report, send an email to ccc-staff@cs.virginia.edu with subject line Project Report: Title and cc-ing all of your team members. The official deadline for the final reports is Monday, 7 December (11:59pm), but extensions will be granted upon request so long as extending the deadline for this does not interfere problematically with your other courses and responsibilities.

The email should be plaintext containing:

A title for your project (this is the title I will use on the public page listing all the projects; add a * if it is different from the title currently listed on Project).

A one-sentence description of your project. This should be a clear, well-written sentence that will be enough for someone to understand what you did and why.

A URL that points to a publicly-viewable web page that describes your project. The linked page can (and probably should) contain links to other pages (e.g., a website that is your actual project or a github repo with your project code). For example, the link you send could be a link to http://my-project-site.org/about.html or https://github.com/your-repo/README.md, which is a page describing your project, as well as containing links to the main project site. Please try to put your project site somewhere that will not expire when you graduate from UVa, but that can survive forever.

Your project report, either as a PDF attachment, or a URL. Your project report should be a well-written and readable paper about your project. For most projects, this should include at least: (1) the motivation for your project, (2) background, including a description of related work (with references), (3) explanation of what you did, and (4) your results. For projects that do not involve building something, it may make more sense for it to be a more integrated report.

By the end of this week, everyone should receive an email with your status in the class (including feedback on PS3).

The main message of this email will be guidance as to whether or not you should schedule a final exam. The main options are:

Youre well positioned to get an A in the class. So long as you do a decent job on the project, youll get an A and dont need to do the final exam.

You are approaching what you need to do to convince us you deserve an A in the class, but need do more. If your project is outstanding, that may be enough to make the case. If not, youll have a last chance to do so by doing a final exam.

From what youve done so far, were not convinced you understand cryptocurrencies well enough to earn an A in the class. You should plan on doing a final exam to convince us otherwise!

For students receving options 1 or 2, well try to give feedback on your final projects are quickly as possible so you know whether or not a final exam will be recommended.

The final exam will be an oral exam where you will explain how bitcoin works, and then answer a few follow-up questions. These will be scheduled during the scheduled final exam time (Friday, 11 December 2-5pm) and other times.

18 Nov 2015

Teams that did not present their project in class Wednesday, should be ready to present well on Monday!

Litecoin boasts faster confirmations (2.5 minutes as opposed to 10 minutes). Does this help you gain confidence in a given transaction faster (at which point it is unlikely to be double-spent)?

16 Nov 2015

Starting Wednesday and every following class: Be prepared to give an elevator pitch for your project. Your pitch should be no more than 2 minutes long. You may use visuals as long as you can obtain them by (quickly) entering a URL in a web browser. Your pitch should get across in a convincing and engaging way:

Monday, 23 November (8:29pm): Project Progress Reports. Send an email to ccc-staff@cs.virginia.edu, cc-ing all members of your project team. The email should have a subject line, Project:Title, with your project title. Its body should contain at least this information:

A link to the website for your project (this could be a github page if you want). That site should have a front page that describes your project, lists the team members, and provides more information about your project.

A short paragraph explaining how your project has changed since the preliminary proposal email. This should explain if the goals of your project have changed and why.

A description of what progress you have made on your project.

A description of what you plan to do to complete your project, and your plans for doing this. If you have a multi-person team, this should include an explanation of how your team is working together and who is doing what.

(optional) Any questions you have for us.

Vignesh raised a really good point about Chaums scheme which I misunderstood in class until he clarified it after, so Im posting an explanation here.

The issue he noticed is that if the bank knows all the possible I values (all the customer identities), and receives one of the identity split perimages, e.g., I1L, then the bank can search through all the identities to find an I1R such that h(I1R) matches the hash value. This is done by just xor-ing all the I values with I1L to find a guess for I1R, and then computing the hash to check if it is the right one. As I presented the scheme, this would be a big vulnerability! It violates the desired property that the bill spenders anonymity is protected (even from the bank) unless she attempts to spend the bill twice.

To defeat this, we need to ensure that the set of possible I values is not known (even to the bank). One way to do this would be to add some randomness in the I values used in the generated banknotes used in the cut-and-choose for the blind signatures. Each note with have a different I, but one the bank can verify is still the right account owner. Ill leave the details of how to do this as a challenge problem.

16 Nov 2015

This page should contain everyones submitted project idea. Well keep this updated as the projects develop, so please let us know if things change (you can also post comments on the page for updates).

The slides from Alex and Nicks presentation are now posted: Scaling Bitcoin and Web Bitcoin Blockchain 2.0.

12 Nov 2015

Last class, we talked about using Graph Isomorphism as the basis for a zero knowledge proof, based on the assumption that it is a computationally hard problem to determine if two graphs are isomorphic.

Yesterday, Laszlo Babai presented a result that claims a quasipolynomial time algorithm for graph isomorphism (that is, shows graph isomorphism is not a hard enough problem to use as the basis for a zero knowledge proof).

Jeremy Kuns summary of Babais presentation A Big Result on Graph Isomorphism

Note that this has no bearing on the zero knowledge proofs based on the hardness of graph three-coloring, which, unlike graph isomorphism, is know to be NP-Complete.

12 Nov 2015

As Cyrus and Collin mentioned in class yesterday, Special Agent Jeremy DErrico, who visited our class earlier in the semester, will be the guest speaker at the meeting of the UVa Computer and Network Security Club tonight (Thursday) at 7:00pm. Hell talk about Cryptowall malware and efforts to analyze and detect it.

The meeting will be in Thorton D223.

11 Nov 2015

Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Myriam, Muriel, Michael), Louis Guillou (Marie Annick, Gaid, Anna, Gwenole, Soazig), How to Explain Zero-Knowledge Protocols to Your Children. (Explains how zero-knowledge protocols work using a story about the Strange Cave of Ali Baba.)

Ben Sasson et al. Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin

Miers, I.; Garman, C.; Green, M.; Rubin, A.D. Zerocoin: Anonymous distributed e-cash from bitcoin

9 Nov 2015

The slides from Nick Skelsey and Alex Kucks presentation about ombuds are here: Scaling Bitcoin and Web Bitcoin Blockchain 2.0.

9 Nov 2015

Project Pre-Proposals are due Friday (November 13) at 8:29pm.

Your pre-proposal should include the following information:

Names of everyone on the project team - you may work on your own, or with any number of teammates. The expected impressiveness of your project should scale at least as the square root of the number of project members.

Title of your project - a short title that gets across what your project is about.

Idea for your project - one or two paragraphs that explain what the purpose of your project is and what you plan to do.

Expected outcome - what you hope will be the outcome of your project. This should explain what you expect to be able to deliver by the end of semester, and how the world will benefit from it.

Related work - list of projects (which could include papers, companies, etc.) that had goals related to yours. You do not have to have studied these in detail yet, but should have identified starting points to look at.

Immediate plans - what are the next steps you plan to do.

Please submit this as a plain text email to ccc-staff@cs.virginia.edu.

Your email should have as its subject line: Project: Title where Title is the title of your project. It should include all team members as ccd recipients. It should include your answers to the six points above, clearly numbered. Do not use any PDF attachments unless it is really necessary to provide a figure for your idea to be understandable.

4 Nov 2015

Mondays class will be a visit from Nick Skelsey and Alex Kuck of Ombuds!

Link:

Cryptocurrency Cabal

Americas #1 Cryptocurrency: The Secret Currency …

A sudden avalanche of folks have been asking about this pitch again, so I thought Id re-share and update my thoughts on something I wrote in the Friday File for the Irregulars back in October of 2013 so yes, this is getting a little old. Much of this is from that original note, or from my update back in January of 2014, though Ive gone through and updated my thoughts (and some of the numbers) a little bit.

From my quick glance, the core of the spiel from the Stansberry folks hasnt changed much for this Secret Currency since then, other than to call it the #1 Cryptocurrency now that that term has entered the popular lexicon (and indeed, the ad is not dramatically different than it was when I first covered similar ads of theirs five or six years ago).

The one thing thats particularly different in the last year or two is that they use the curiosity about Bitcoin to catch your attention

The ad back in 2013 started out as a warning about Bitcoin:

Urgent Message for U.S. Investors:

Do NOT buy Bitcoin until you watch this public message

This is the true story of alternative currencies in America the one you wont hear anywhere else. The story only wealthy families know. Please take five minutes to watch this message and avoid making a very costly Bitcoin mistake.

And then went on to compare Bitcoin to a host of past internet failures or value-destroyers like Webvan and Pets.com and Groupon, and then makes the argument that the secret currency does the same things Bitcoin does (provide some privacy, get away from the US dollar, etc.).

Which is sort of true I have some experience with both this secret currency and with Bitcoin, I tinkered with Bitcoin myself for a to see how it worked and whether it might be a viable alternative to using credit cards, and Im not all that impressed with how useful it might become at the moment though I still have maybe half a bit coin sitting in a wallet somewhere.

This is how they introduce the ad now:

Continue reading here:

Americas #1 Cryptocurrency: The Secret Currency ...

Navigating the cryptocurrency minefield

Contrary to popular belief, virtual currency is actually extremely secure

The online payments industry is in a phase of change with developments coming thick and fast in how payments are made, on what devices and in what form.

Understandably, many businesses trying to navigate the online payments industry are finding it hard to know which direction to take in these turbulent times.

However, the variety of new payment opportunities also makes it an exciting time for those who are willing to take a gamble and ride the rapids, so to speak.

One of the most intriguing developments in the payments industry is the rise of cryptocurrencies, which have the potential to completely alter the landscape of the industry as we know it.

>See also:Something you didn't notice in the Chancellor's Budget 2015: a step forward for bitcoin

Free from any banking or state authority, and designed for the world of online payments, cryptocurrencies are arguably the next step in the evolution of money. Yet, despite all its revolutionary potential, this is a payment option that many businesses are wary of.

The big concern with cryptocurrency is how secure an investment it is without the same levels of regulations in place, and with no insurance, how can you guarantee your money will retain its value, or be there at all?

Moreover, only years into the short history of cryptocurrency there are already real-life examples of how it can go terribly wrong.

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Navigating the cryptocurrency minefield

Conligus & OneCoin – Welcome to the future of cryptocurrency – Video


Conligus OneCoin - Welcome to the future of cryptocurrency
Welcome to the future of cryptocurrency! Bienvenidos al futuro de la criptodivida! La fusion entre Conligus y OneCoin es la mayor union entre dos enormes compaias de MLM hasta el momento....

By: Mariana Lopez de Waard

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Conligus & OneCoin - Welcome to the future of cryptocurrency - Video

SoulConfiscator 028 Funny Money DogeCoin Bitcoin CryptoCurrency P2P #BTC4 IT Andreas Antonopoulos – Video


SoulConfiscator 028 Funny Money DogeCoin Bitcoin CryptoCurrency P2P #BTC4 IT Andreas Antonopoulos
http://www.twitter.com/VanosEnigmA http://www.facebook.com/VanosEnigmA http://www.twitter.com/CryptoEEV Thank you mucho meow for your donation: Bitcoin Address: 1FJ9ZZcnKqhiiYWNhbpBaqy9QQHTBSmsP8 ...

By: VanosEnigmA Enigmaisland

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SoulConfiscator 028 Funny Money DogeCoin Bitcoin CryptoCurrency P2P #BTC4 IT Andreas Antonopoulos - Video

SoulConfiscator 035 Bitcoin: Winning the Media War FilmMaking Drama CryptoCurrency P2P BTC4 VideoMix – Video


SoulConfiscator 035 Bitcoin: Winning the Media War FilmMaking Drama CryptoCurrency P2P BTC4 VideoMix
http://www.twitter.com/VanosEnigmA http://www.facebook.com/VanosEnigmA http://www.twitter.com/CryptoEEV Thank you mucho meow for your donation: Bitcoin Address: 1FJ9ZZcnKqhiiYWNhbpBaqy9QQHTBSmsP8 ...

By: VanosEnigmA Enigmaisland

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SoulConfiscator 035 Bitcoin: Winning the Media War FilmMaking Drama CryptoCurrency P2P BTC4 VideoMix - Video

SoulConfiscator 021 "Bitcoin Jesus" Roger Ver CryptoCurrency #BTC4 ProTip P2P BlockChain VideoMix – Video


SoulConfiscator 021 "Bitcoin Jesus" Roger Ver CryptoCurrency #BTC4 ProTip P2P BlockChain VideoMix
http://www.twitter.com/VanosEnigmA http://www.facebook.com/VanosEnigmA http://www.twitter.com/CryptoEEV Thank you mucho meow for your donation: Bitcoin Address: 1FJ9ZZcnKqhiiYWNhbpBaqy9QQHTBSmsP8 ...

By: VanosEnigmA Enigmaisland

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SoulConfiscator 021 "Bitcoin Jesus" Roger Ver CryptoCurrency #BTC4 ProTip P2P BlockChain VideoMix - Video